The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday threw out a lawsuit seeking to block President Donald Trump's plan to exclude immigrants living illegally in the United States from the population count used to allocate congressional districts to states.
Colette Luke has more.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday threw out a lawsuit seeking to block President Donald Trump's plan to exclude immigrants living in the United States illegally from the population count used to allocate congressional districts to states.
The 6-3 ruling - with the court's six conservatives in the majority and three liberals dissenting - gives Trump a short-term victory as he pursues his hard-line policies toward immigration in the final weeks of his presidency.
But the court’s decision is not a final ruling on the matter.
The justices left open the possibility of fresh litigation if Trump's administration completes its plan.
The unsigned decision said that quote "judicial resolution of this dispute is premature" in part because it is not clear what the administration plans to do.
The ruling noted that the court was not weighing the merits of Trump's plan.
The Trump administration is battling against the clock to follow through on the vaguely defined proposal before President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan 20.
The administration has not disclosed what method it would use to calculate the number of people it proposed to exclude or which subsets of immigrants would be targeted.
Challengers led by New York state and the American Civil Liberties Union said Trump's proposal would dilute the political clout of states with larger numbers of such immigrants, including heavily Democratic California, by undercounting state populations and depriving them of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives to the benefit of his fellow Republicans.
There are an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally.
The challengers have argued that Trump's policy violates both the Constitution and the Census Act, a federal law that outlines how the census is conducted.
Until now, the U.S. government's practice was to count all people regardless of their citizenship or immigration status.
The Trump Administration memorandum seeks to exclude undocumented workers from the census count.